Wiesel: A Holocaust Survivor Turns Horror Into Art

The Fifth Son By Elie Wiesel. Summit, 220 Pages, $15.95

March 24, 1985|By Reviewed by Thomas Williams, a National Book Award-winning author whose most recent novel is ``The Followed Man``

In the lives of my generation--those who became politically conscious before and during World War II--there are certain events that cause what I can only call nausea of the soul. There was the Bomb, the Cold War, the seemingly unavoidable industrial poisoning of the world--and the revelation, in 1945, of the Holocaust. This is the secret most vile, its numbers so vast as to be almost normalizing, its lessons avoidable only by a psychotic denial that it ever happened. How can this event be explained in any way? We look again and again at the pictures, touch the hair, count the shoes of the vanished. What can be said about it, even by Elie Wiesel, a camp survivor?

``The Fifth Son`` is told in the voice of a man born after the war, the child of survivors. His father and mother always have been distant, preoccupied with mysteries they will never reveal to him, and the novel is the journal of his discovery of what, exactly, has wounded his mother into madness and turned his father into a morose and secretive, though gentle, man who will never answer his son`s questions about the past.

The characters in the novel are few and balanced as to qualities, for the novel is, on one level, a philosophical exploration of the morality of revenge. There is the haunted, scholarly father, Reuven Tamiroff, and his friend and fellow survivor, Simha Zeligson, called Simha-the-Dark, a sort of cabalist who deals in shadows and works toward the coming of the Messiah. Another friend is the less intellectual Bontchek, a man of a simpler kind of courage, successful in the world.

These three, along with the narrator`s mother, who is now in a clinic for the insane, survived a ghetto called Davarowsk and the attentions of the German officer in charge, one Richard Lander, called ``The Angel,`` a death-obsessed sadist who murdered, among hundreds of others, Simha`s wife and Reuven`s first son, a child named Ariel. They swore revenge, and after the war actually participated in what they thought was ``The Angel`s`` death by grenade.

Reuven and Simha have met regularly ever since, in their new country, America, to argue the morality of their act, to try to get rid of their guilt, to somehow justify themselves or to condemn themselves. But the narrator, the other son, finds that ``The Angel`` was only wounded, and that under another name he is alive, a successful businessman in the German town of Reshastadt.

So the narrator, whom we come to realize is never named, goes to Germany to confront the murderer. The significance of the book`s title has been partially revealed earlier, on a Passover when Simha is visiting Reuven and his young son, who are reciting the Haggadah. Simha interrupts them:

`` `Reuven,` he said to my father, `fulfill your duty as a Jewish father.`

``My father looked at him perplexed but did not answer.

`` `The Haggadah,` continued Simha, `tells us of the four sons and their attitude toward the question. The first knows the question and assumes it; the second knows the question and rejects it; the third endures the question with indifference; the fourth does not even know the question. There is, of course, a fifth son, but he does not appear in the tale because he is gone. Thus, the duty of a Jewish father is to the living. When will you finally understand, Reuven, that the dead are not part of the Haggadah?` ``

At that time the narrator was unaware that he had ever had a brother, only that his mother and father, in their guilt and grief, have been unable to be to him what he has always wanted. So the fifth son, who was not there, is in a sense both Ariel and the narrator, who later goes to Germany for revenge, or revelation, or whatever will happen. We follow him there.

According to information supplied by the publisher, this novel, which was written in French, was a best seller in France and won Le grand prix de la Litterature de la Ville de Paris. Though it is a work of passion and intelligence, ``The Fifth Son`` does sound translated from the French, by which I mean that its language is logical, authoritative and clear but lacks metaphorical, sensual excitement.

Even so, it is a moving and believable novel that should be read, and I hope it will be. It is an act of bravery for a writer to go back, to deal with such elementary horrors and to try to make fiction from them--not necessarily because of the horror but because of art`s final necessity, that it answer every question it raises, and because the deepest questions of the Holocaust may be unanswerable by someone who still has the passionate sanguinity to ask them.